The Hack Base

The Hack Base was my first project to use the Django framework, a very popular model-view-controller framework for Python projects. While it is a mix between front-end and back-end technologies, I will focus on the back-end tech (read "Python") here. The project intended to be a canonical database of journalists ("hacks",) their publishers, and their works (in many ways, similar to CrunchBase .) As a result, the MVC style of development would prove particularly beneficial, and the models would be pretty simple.

The application was written to run on Google App Engine, but needed the ability to be converted to a traditional RDMS. As such, I created foreign connections and intermediate tables (e.g. for many-to-many relations) which generally wouldn't make sense in a Big Table environment. That said, the number of queries for any particular page was quite small; I didn't see any need to de-normalize the data.

Regarding the schema layout, there's a table representing publishers, journalists, work, and a join table to connect publishers to journalists (as journalists will join and leave publishers over time.) As each piece of work has a specific author, works have a foreign key to the journalist table. Based on the date a work was published, it would be possible to determine for which publisher it was created through a few joins.

Code

The first Django project, publishers (/publishers,) is the smaller of the two, containing a single model and few controllers (unfortunately known as "views" in Django parlance.) The model has a string (a "slug") as its unique identifier and has the nice property that it will automatically generate a unique slug from the publisher's name. The controllers are rudimentary, offering listing page and a profile/edit page.

The second project, journalists (/journalists,) has a bit more going for it in terms of complexity. The journalist model follows a similar slug-based unique identifier (this time using the journalist's full name.) There's also a model representing a work (including a permalink to that work's content,) and a multi-to-multi table connecting journalists and publishers. This join table has additional fields to keep track of when the journalist joined and potentially left the publisher.

While the majority of the functions in the journalists view.py file are to-be-expected from django (listings, profiles, etc.,) both the editPublishing() and editWork() functions have something a bit uncommon. From a single page (the journalist profile,) users were able to add multiple objects representing publisher history and/or work. To accomplish this, I had some javascript which would generate new (hereto unseen) form fields. The Python backend would then check the entries in the database against those provided by the user, saving existing and new entries, and deleting any entries which were not in the user's input.

Technology Choices

  • Python - As mentioned before, Python's a great, general-purpose language. The ability to meta-program and dynamic typing allow it to work particularly well with a framework like Django, which uses these traits to create concise, largely-legible code.
  • Django - One of the primary Python frameworks, Django should definitely be reviewed whenever starting a new project. It has a great deal of support in the Python community, including many, many plugins which will make life much easier for development (consider that XSS tokens were added to all forms without any of my code declaring them.) Django also runs well on Google App Engine as well as in dedicated boxes, which makes it a particularly portable solution.
© C.M. Lubinski 2008-2021